Makefile tips

Prepend ‘-’ to ignore returned value

This can be nice for some tools whose returned value you are not interested. For example, I use make to automate some of my work, and I use this to print diff of two files, who are expected to differ.

Prepend ‘@’ to prevent printing the command

Mostly used with ‘echo’, so that the same thing isn’t printed twice.

To re-run configure (I use this for FlameRobin) with same options:

alias regen=’`head config.log | grep opt | sed “s1.*.1..1”`’

Please note the grep opt part. It needs some text from original configure line. I use opt, since wxWidgets is installed under /opt for me.

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2007-11-22